It was Leonard’s interference that was the trouble. He interfered about everything. Why, he had even said that she mustn’t go out of the flat by herself! She must stay there, cooped up in those little rooms, all the time he was away!
Away. Of course! Guilty, cautious relief began slowly to spread through Laura’s old frame as she reminded herself that Leonard had gone away this morning, and was to be away for two whole days. For two days—for forty-eight hours—she could do exactly what she liked! Why, she could go out for a walk—anything! Because, really, compared with the few and unobtrusive restrictions at the Home, Leonard’s solicitude seemed to Laura repressive and absurd—utterly uncalled-for. Mustn’t go out of the flat, indeed! Mustn’t try to do anything by herself! Really!
Here Laura had to admit that, until he’d laid down these prohibitions, it hadn’t occurred to her to go out of the flat or to try and do anything by herself. Never mind, though … just look at her now! Out on the landing! Why, she’d be down the stairs next. And is anyone so decrepit that they can’t hail a taxi, and go where they choose, with their own money and in their own time? On a lovely sunny morning like this, too—why, she could do anything!
Except dance, of course.
*
Ellen’s ears were ringing with the clamour of the big London terminus as she sat on Leonard’s suitcase at the far end of the platform, waiting for him to return from the bookstall. She was wondering whether her sleeveless cotton dress was perhaps unsuitable for these surroundings, even on so hot a day as this. It would certainly have been unsuitable for actually travelling on one of those long-distance trains to the North, but then of course she was not travelling on one of them; she was only seeing Leonard off. Though she could hardly wear a label saying so to avert possible disapproving glances….
So, in default of this, Ellen whiled away the time by watching for other women wearing sleeveless dresses to give her reassurance. Yes, there was a girl in a strapless sundress; but then she was years younger than Ellen. Never mind, here was a woman well into her thirties—maybe even forty; but her dress, although sleeveless had a high neck, so that the effect was quite different….
“You look anxious, darling.”
Leonard’s voice sounded really concerned as he smiled down at her on her low seat, looking unexpectedly handsome from this unfamiliar angle. “Cheer up; I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
Hastily, almost unconsciously, adapting herself to this interpretation of her anxious looks, Ellen answered:
“Oh, I know. It’s hardly any time. And don’t worry about your mother; I’ll go in every day and see she’s all right.”
A flicker of anxiety crossed Leonard’s face, and he chewed his lower lip for a moment before answering.
“Y-yes, Ellen. That’s jolly nice of you. But I wouldn’t stay too long, you know…. Just a chat about the weather … that sort of thing. You must remember that she’s very easily tired now. And very easily upset, too. I don’t think you realise.”
“Oh, I do,” Ellen assured him. “I won’t tire her, I promise. But she must have a little bit of company to cheer her up, all alone there.”
“She’s not alone. She has my landlady,” said Leonard, rather sharply. “I told you, Mrs Clarke has undertaken full charge of her while I’m away. She’s had a lot of experience with old people. I do advise you to leave the job to her, Ellen. And don’t, please, try that crazy business of dragging her round to your place, the way you did last Saturday. I told you it would upset her, and it did. She was quite ill all the next day.”
“But she seemed to enjoy it so much …” protested Ellen and stopped in confusion. Would she never learn the folly of arguing with Leonard—well, with any man, of course, she amended; they were all the same. For his smile had quite vanished, and he made an impatient movement away from her.
“Oh, Ellen, I wish you’d grow up! This childish naïveté may have been attractive once, but it’s not now—not in a woman your age! Can’t you see the effect it had on her, meeting your father again? Don’t you remember what she said the moment she woke up—‘I hate you—I hate you—I hate you!’”
Leonard seemed to fling the words at her like so many missiles—quoting them with a venom greater, it seemed to Ellen, than they had ever possessed at the time. She was suddenly angry. No, she wouldn’t ever learn not to argue with Leonard—she’d be hanged if she would!
“She didn’t say it like that at all,” she retorted. “And anyway—how do you know she was referring to my father? She’d just been woken suddenly, she was probably still dreaming.”
“Exactly. She was dreaming. That’s just when one’s real, deepest feelings come to the surface. The feelings that are normally repressed, because they are too dreadful for one’s conscious mind to entertain. I’d have thought that everyone knew that nowadays, even someone who’s led as sheltered a life as you have!”
He knows exactly where to place his pinpricks, thought Ellen; perhaps we both do. That’s the trouble about knowing each other so well. But why should we want to hurt each other? Seven years’ waiting is too long. We ought to part—or else get married tomorrow….
Had Leonard second sight where she was concerned? At that moment he took her hand and pulled her up from her perch on the suitcase, and, regardless of crowds, threw his arms round her in a close embrace.
“Ellen,” he muttered into her hair, “Ellen, come with me! Come with me to Leeds—now. Let’s stay there and not come back! I need you, Ellen—I need you terribly!”
Startled—deeply touched and yet uneasy—Ellen drew away from him.
“Leonard!” she protested, half laughing. “You know I can’t! I mean—how could I leave Father? At a moment’s notice like this?”
“No—I know you can’t. It was just a wild idea.”
Leonard smiled down at her, a little pityingly, she fancied. He took her hand gently.
“Forgive me if I’ve been unreasonable,” he said. “I have a lot to worry me, you know—and now I’ve got to worry about you as well. Will you trust me, Ellen, and believe that what I’ve been telling you is important? I know you feel that Mother is so old that her loves and hates can’t amount to much any more—but you’re only looking at the surface—at the obvious manifestations. Hate is stronger than you know, Ellen, and more subtle, too. Hate can be a catalyst—I suppose you know what that is? It can sometimes set up a chain-reaction that can’t be stopped; no, not even if the hater and the hated become reconciled; not even if they grow old and indifferent; not even if they die….”
A great roaring from the incoming train filled Ellen’s ears, drowned his voice. Again his arms were round her, and for a brief moment Ellen was pretending that he was a soldier lover off to the wars, and that her heart was breaking.
But it wasn’t breaking. On the contrary, as she walked back, alone, to the ticket barrier, she could feel it growing lighter, gayer, with every step; though she wouldn’t allow her mind to formulate the reason in actual words:
“Freedom! Two whole days of freedom!”
CHAPTER X
ON THE WAY HOME from the station Ellen bought some mackerel to fry for Father’s lunch. The doctor had said that he should only have white fish, and that it should be steamed. But then the doctor didn’t have to see Father’s face as this wholesome dish was set before him; didn’t have to listen to his comments on modern young women who, in spite of their expensive educations, will believe anything any fool of a quack likes to tell them, and would sooner watch their own fathers starve than use a little common sense. Nor did he have to come into the kitchen an hour later to find Father concocting himself a snack of cold pork and pickled onions with new bread.
So Ellen compromised by giving Father the sort of meals he enjoyed, and feeling vaguely guilty about it. Like most women, she felt that a slight sense of guilt was a sort of guarantee against her misdemeanours doing any actual harm; and this comfortable balance of irrationality was only upset if the doctor happened to pay h
is weekly call during one of these illicit repasts. This danger was greatly increased by Mr Fortescue’s insistence on having his midday meal at twelve, or even earlier; and as Ellen hurried home with her mackerel she was already composing a list of unnecessary questions to ask the doctor in the morning-room while Father gobbled down the last of his mackerel in the kitchen. What proportion of Health Service time, she wondered, was devoted to these sort of delaying actions, and did “They” know about it? Really, it must add up to just as much waste as the over-prescribing of medicines you were always hearing about. Because it wasn’t only neglect of a doctor’s instructions that made such subterfuges necessary; just think, too, of all the doctors kept chatting in tidy front sitting-rooms while someone tears about the bedroom pushing dirty plates and towels under the bed and turning the sheet round so that the coffee stains don’t show.
By this time Ellen had reached home, and as soon as she came into the hall she realised that another, even more urgent, problem awaited her. Doctor, mackerel and Father would all have to be shelved for a few minutes while she decided what to do about the stairs.
The stairs. Who would have guessed that this lovely old oak staircase curved graciously upwards into such an armed camp of tearful recrimination as existed at the moment between Melissa and Mrs Hammond? The tearfulness, of course, was all Mrs Hammond’s; the recriminations—indeed the downright scolding—was Melissa’s; both were directed exclusively at Ellen, and the subject of it all was the stairs.
It had been Melissa’s idea in the first place—and a thoroughly kind and well-intentioned idea it was—that she and Mrs Hammond should take over the cleaning of the stairs. It wasn’t fair, Melissa had generously declared, that Ellen should be expected to do it when she and her father lived entirely on the ground floor and never used the stairs at all. And so, Melissa had briskly organised, she would do them one week, and Mrs Hammond the next. And so on. Alternately. It couldn’t be simpler. Did Mrs Hammond understand? And agree?
Oh yes, Mrs Hammond, beaming all over her vague rosy face, quite understood. And quite agreed. And disappeared, still beaming, into her big cluttered room and shut the door.
And so had begun Melissa’s week; and, really, she had been terribly good about it. In spite of her full-time job, and her flat to run, she had managed to keep the stairs spotless. Neat and crisp in her check overall, she would be on the job before seven in the morning, brushing the shabby haircord carpet with quick, deft movements, and rubbing the old oak till it even shone a little, as if in dim remembrance of the days when regular polishing by well-trained housemaids was the birthright of every wooden thing. Actually, of course, it was all this early morning enthusiasm which had first started the Butlers on their polite but relentless campaign about noise, but Ellen could never bring herself to tell Melissa this, when it was so very good of her to do the job at all.
And good, too, in her own way, was Mrs Hammond. She, during her week, never once complained that the dust and dirt raised by Melissa’s family tramping in and out from work and school must, in the nature of things, be much greater than that caused by her solitary self. Mud from hockey boots; scraps of paper and bits of broken crayon from satchels frantically upended in search of a forgotten book; pollen and bits of twig from vegetation in headlong transit to and from Adela’s colony of imprisoned caterpillars—it was these things that made it necessary that the stairs should be swept every day instead of the once or twice a week that would have been ample for Mrs Hammond’s own way of life. Yet Mrs Hammond made no protest. Every day she would smilingly set herself to the task—smilingly, but, alas, sadly inefficiently and tardily. Often it was half-past four in the afternoon before she would emerge from her fastnesses in what had once been the nursery, bearing an ancient broom with sparse, limp bristles. Wielding this implement delicately, like an artist with a paint brush, she would proceed to flick the dust and dirt daintily from one side of the step to the other all the way down the stairs, and then depart with heavy satisfaction, every laboured breath and every dislodged wisp of greying hair proclaiming a job well done.
Ellen hadn’t the heart to complain; nor, if it came to complaining to Mrs Hammond’s face, had anyone else in the house. Instead, they all complained to Ellen. Couldn’t she get Mrs. Hammond to do it better? … Really, you felt you couldn’t bring visitors to the house at all during her week…. Or couldn’t someone else do it?
Had they tried suggesting to Mrs Hammond that someone else should do it? Of course they hadn’t; or they would have known that an attack by armed bandits and the plundering of all her wordly goods couldn’t have reduced Mrs Hammond to a greater degree of tearful dismay. Occasionally Ellen had tried to solve the problem by doing the stairs herself—secretly, and with many cautious glances at Mrs Hammond’s closed door. But Mrs Hammond always noticed—indeed, more often than not she caught Ellen in the act, for she was hardly ever out, and though slightly deaf, her ears seemed attuned to the furtive tapping of Ellen’s brush as a mother’s are to her baby’s crying.
The ensuing scenes were not acrimonious; they were heart-breaking. Mrs Hammond had done her best; she’d thought she was helping. She’d wanted to do her little bit—had always hoped she was a good tenant, but now it seemed …
But of course she was a good tenant, Ellen always assured her warmly—and sincerely, too, for assuredly Mrs Hammond was a good tenant, so willing and so tolerant. Look how she allowed Melissa to use that extra room of hers for storing all that junk. But Melissa was a good tenant, too, so active and helpful; and so were the Butlers, with their quiet, regular ways. They were all of them good tenants; but good, reflected Ellen gloomily, in such dreadfully incompatible ways.
This morning she looked thoughtfully at the accumulated dust of Mrs Hammond’s four days’ sovereignty. Dare she, perhaps, get a brush—or at least a duster—and clean up the worst of it? There was no sound from Mrs Hammond’s room, but of course that didn’t necessarily mean that she was out. She often spent long hours just sitting, looking at the paper, perhaps, or slowly, slowly sewing buttons on things. All the same, Ellen decided to risk it; what with the doctor expected today, and that young couple coming to supper with Melissa tonight, the stairs just couldn’t be left like this.
Bracing herself as though for a reconnaissance into enemy territory, Ellen fetched a duster from the kitchen, and, creeping up the stairs like a burglar, she began softly rubbing the dust off the top step.
A duster wasn’t a very efficient tool, of course, not when there were actual objects mixed with the dust; dead matches, bits of leaf, and fat balls of fluff from four days’ neglect. And she couldn’t even use a dustpan for fear of the little clatter of dead matches falling into it. Tightening her lips in distaste, she collected the oddments into her free hand, flattering herself that at least she was making no noise. Even her breathing was shallow and soundless as she listened tensely for any stir of movement in Mrs Hammond’s room, and the soft yellow duster made no sound at all on the old smooth oak.
A loud knock on the front door made Ellen jump as though a troop of highwaymen had leaped out on her. (How was it that kindness and good intentions all round could make an ordinary, sensible woman feel like this about sweeping her own stairs?) Such was her guilty alarm that if she had been working with dustpan and brush they would certainly have gone clattering down the stairs. As it was, the duster fell innocuously on to the carpet, and Ellen clutched the ridiculous handful of dirt tightly in her left hand. It would be the doctor, of course; what a way to greet him, with a handful of sweepings like this, and there wasn’t any kind of wastepaper-basket between here and the front door.
But it wasn’t the doctor. It was a taxi-man who stood there, rather flushed and hot, and glancing down a little anxiously at the frail old lady who leaned heavily on his arm.
“Cousin Laura!” cried Ellen in amazement “Why—I mean—how nice to see you!”
The taxi-man, looking distinctly relieved at these signs of recognition, released his charge
to Ellen, and, after pocketing the money which Cousin Laura counted out into his hand with careful exactitude, he made a hasty retreat—evidently too much relieved at being rid of this unwonted responsibility to make any comment on Cousin Laura’s pre-war idea of a tip.
Ellen led the old lady into the morning-room—it was still given this title though actually it was now simply Ellen’s and her father’s sitting-room. Cousin Laura was evidently exhausted, but also exceedingly pleased with herself, and when Ellen had helped her into the armchair she gave a sigh of content.
“You’ve quite altered this room, Ellen dear,” she observed as soon as she had recovered her breath. “You’ve got Mama’s old bedroom carpet down here, I see. And the china cabinet out of the drawing-room—it looks so odd with books in it! But never mind—it still feels like coming home.”
Cousin Laura smiled contentedly. It did feel like coming home—if only it wasn’t for that tiresome piece of business that had to be settled with Dick; the thought of that still hanging over her really rather spoilt the pleasure of her visit. Still, it had to be done—and done now, while Leonard was away and couldn’t interfere. Laura closed her eyes, exhausted: the very thought of such a business made her quite breathless—set her heart thumping….
“You’re looking tired, Cousin Laura. Would you like a glass of Father’s port?”
Another knock on the front door. This time it was the doctor, and Father was nowhere to be found. For nearly ten minutes Ellen was alternately searching the house and garden and running back to the doctor to apologise—for really, it seemed terribly irresponsible simply to have lost the patient. He turned up at last, however, exceedingly scornful of the commotion he had caused, and explaining that he had simply been for a stroll round the Five-Acre. Round the block, he meant, of course; but he had never seen any reason why he should be expected to change his name for the five-acre meadow merely because they had chosen to build houses all over it; so the Five-Acre it remained—even Ellen often found herself referring to the area thus, and had to pull herself sharply, by an effort of will, back into her own generation.
Seven Lean Years Page 9